What It Meant to Be A Serf

Posted on January 3, 2007 in History

The following passage from Edward Crankshaw’s In the Shadow of the Winter Palace illustrates the nature of the institution of [[serfdom]] in Russia, some conservatives’ ideal of the “good old days”:

Count Peter Sheremetyev and his son Nicholas were manic builders. All their money, and much more, went on the building and maintenance of palaces and the provision of extravagant entertainments in the grandest imaginable manner….

These were intended not as places to live but in effect as permanent architectural set stages….[[Kuskovo]], exquitsite in the Palladian style, its construction supervised from start to finish by a serf architect, Alexei Mironov, besides its suite of connected reception rooms, its vast ballroom, its state bedroom modelled on the bedroom of [[Louis XIV]] at [[Versailles]], its [[rococo]] garden pavillions, and its vast park, contained at one time three separate theatres (one of them in the open air), for opera, ballet, and drama. The stage designers, the scene-painters, the actors, dancers, and singers and musicians alike were all serfs. Barbara Cherkassy had brought with her dowry a number of gifted painter serfs from her own family estates. The Sheremetyevs themselves clearly went out of their way to develop latent artistic talent in their own serfs and to acquire others who showed talent. Some, like the builder-architect, Mironov, were very gifted indeed and in the West would have carved out independent careers. The leading soprano in Nicholas Sheremetyev’s opera company at [[Ostankino]] (where the theater with all its elaborate machinery is still intact), Parasha Koyaleva, was widely renowned; the daughter of a blacksmith serf on one of the Sheremetyev estates, she was picked out by her master at the age of eleven, trained as a musician under the best masters in Moscow, taught French and Italian. Besides winning fame as a singer, she was a great beauty, and in the end her master married her. It was somehow characteristic of the Sheremetyev world that after building up his famous opera company, giving the first performances of Gluck and Mozart in Russia and marrying his prima donna, Nicholas Sheremetyev suddenly became bored with playing impresario, disbanded his company, and returned his celebrated troupe to household and horticultural duties.